The idea behind a templating system is to separate logic from layout. The Smarty Template system does a good job of doing this. Here we will convert our basic guestbook example to use Smarty. We separate the HTML from the PHP code into templates/smartyguest.tpl and ./smartyguest.php respectively. My Guestbook

Welcome to my Guestbook

Please write me a little note below

The entries so far:

{section name=msgs loop=$notes} {$notes[msgs].id} {$notes[msgs].ts} {$notes[msgs].comment}
{/section} ]]> debugging = true; mysql_connect('localhost','nobody'); mysql_select_db('mydb'); /* insert new note */ if(isset($note)) { $ts = date("Y-m-d H:i:s"); mysql_query("insert into comments values (0,'$note','$ts')"); } /* read existing notes */ $result = mysql_query('select * from comments'); if(!$result) echo mysql_error(); while($notes[]=mysql_fetch_array($result,MYSQL_ASSOC)); $smarty->assign('notes',$notes); $smarty->display("smartyguest.tpl"); ?>]]>